Our Urban Town a Publication of the Staten Island Urban CenterOur Urban Town is a quarterly publication that shares thought provoking, intellectually provocative, community news, ideas and opinions from Staten Island's urban neighborhoods.

#reSIStah issue​in celebration of women's history month

​the Woke reSIStah Issue Our Urban Town publishes thought provoking ideas, intellectually provocative reflections, community news, and opinions from the very people in the community who passionately live and/or work with these issues. In this Woke ReSistah Issue, Our Urban Town shares the writings of women activists on Staten Island as a tribute to the contributions of women right now in this borough. Due to space constraints, these are just a small sample of women activists doing the work on the island, but our hope is that these writings inspire readers to be or continue to be activists, to share real stories, advocate for real solutions and to fight for real for the things they believe in. In the era of WOKE and RESIST, it’s our time to be activists everywhere we go and in everything we do.Kelly Vilar,​Editor of Our Urban Town & ​CEO of Staten Island Urban Center

Editor’s PageAnnecia Steiniger- Special Youth Issue Editor for Our Urban TownGraniteville Resident, Allegheny College We went on a walking tour of the proposed Maritime Education Recreation & Culture corridor sometime during July. On this tour, we stopped at the URBY apartment complex and when we asked a man who was standing on the opposite side of the gate if he knew where we could enter to see the garden they supposedly have he asked us, “Are you supposed to be meeting somebody here?” and then walked away, without giving us any information. I thought it was rude, the question, his tone, the way he walked away without answering, the entire thing. I mentioned it to someone else on our walk and I remember him saying, “I didn’t catch that but now that you mention, yeah, it was kind of rude”, or something to that effect. Obviously, it was more than just the stranger’s lack of manners and common decency that I found irksome. It was that his question and his tone implied that we did not belong in and should not be granted access to this semi-public space. Oftentimes claims like this are dismissed with a, “You’re just reading too much into it.”, but hear me out. URBY isn’t just an apartment complex. There are stores and restaurants there which are open to the public, not just residents and their guests. URBY, despite the efforts of those I expect would like it to be that way, is not a hermetically sealed community of only the chosen few who can afford to pay the rent and other associated fees. The membrane around URBY is not semi-permeable, only letting specific protein chains through, it lets everything through and it goes both ways. This statement was written about a development in Mexico City, but since that development was built in accordance with recommendations from our former Mayor Giuliani, I’m certain it is relevant. “...the building is a living, work and leisure space where the political and financial elites realize their representations of the city that they inhabit.” (Botello 2013) Developments like these cause further class segregation by concentrating, for the most part, people of the same socioeconomic status in one place and making it so that they never have to leave the confines of their oasis and interact with the poorer people outside. This also leads to the concentration of political power, partially because money and ownership equal voice in the United States and because wealthy people tend to be better connected than the poor. They can more easily bend the ear of their representative. David Harvey describes how urban life and especially quality of urban life have been commodified. You can buy your way into a community. “...a ‘new urbanism’ movement that touts the sale of community and boutique lifestyles to fulfill urban dreams. This is a world in which the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism and its cognate of political withdrawal from collective form of action, becomes the template for human socialization” (Harvey, 2008) If you have enough money you can choose to become a part of a sterilized, curated, urban community. You can have the urban life you dream of without the chaos that come with it. This is inauthentic, it robs urbanity of what has made it such a powerful force for social and economic change for centuries all across the globe. The privatization and commodification of urban community is inherently undemocratic. It exacerbates class stratification, consolidates power, and weakens our communities. What happens when people flee the city for the suburbs again? It will happen, because everything happens in cycles. Will the city fall into crisis again like it did in the Seventies? ​ We should be focused on building sustainable communities for the people who already live here and will likely continue to live here. The chaos, the unpredictability, the mixing of folks of all different stripes is what gives cities their power, it is what makes them vehicles of opportunity for the millions who live in them. We should be trying to preserve that diversity and encouraging that spontaneous mingling with architecture that supports such interactions not curtails them. We all have something to learn from each other.

This is a well thought out argument about one aspect of social class, isolation and gentrification, that is visible here on Staten Island. Well done.

I would like to encourage the author and everyone else to find ways to be firm and kind, which is possible, and respond to others with conviction that of course they belong anywhere they choose. This may require advance preparation and its worth it.